Measuring roughly 1.5 metres across and only half a metre high, it looks, to any passing eye, like something thrown together recently, perhaps by a walker or a farmer with a spare afternoon. Officially, it carries the classification of "Cairn Possible", a designation that acknowledges the ambiguity without fully resolving it.

What gives it purpose, if not great age, is its place within a series of eight such cairns that trace the county boundary through what the record describes as inhospitable mountainous terrain. The cairns serve as boundary markers, the kind of practical, unglamorous monuments that have been used across Ireland and Britain for centuries to resolve the otherwise invisible question of where one administrative territory ends and another begins. Whether these particular stones were set in place in the post-Ordnance Survey era or somewhat earlier is difficult to say with certainty. Tellingly, the 1837 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map shows no trace of this cairn, suggesting it either postdates that survey or simply escaped the attention of its surveyors on difficult ground. The same stone pile is recorded on the Leitrim side of the border under a separate reference number, an administrative curiosity that reflects the fact that boundaries, by definition, belong to two places at once.